Ultimate Security: Finding a Refuge in Difficult Times (6 page)

This is also true of salvation, which is an aspect of the experience of being chosen. Paul wrote to the Christians in Thessalonica:

But we should always give thanks to God for you, brethren beloved by the Lord, because God has chosen you from the beginning for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and faith in the truth. (2 Thessalonians 2:13 nasb)

God chose you for salvation. You were not saved because you chose it. You were saved because God chose it. Never pull the initiative out of God’s hands. As long as you see that the initiative is in God’s hands, you can rest—you can feel confident and secure. However, if you think that everything starts with you, you will never have real inner peace and rest. You will always be uneasy.

If God has chosen us to do something,
it is because He knows that, by His grace,
we will be able to complete the task.

God Called, or “Appointed,” Us

The same principle—that the initiative rests with God—is true of our calling. Jesus said to His apostles,

You did not choose Me but I chose you, and appointed you that you would go and bear fruit, and that your fruit would remain, so that whatever you ask of the Father in My name He may give to you. (John 15:16 nasb)

Jesus was saying, “You didn’t choose Me in order to become apostles. I chose you.” This is true of every function in the body of Christ. We do not choose our calling; we have a calling because the Lord has chosen it for us. Peter applied this truth to his own experience. Speaking to the council gathered in Jerusalem, he said,

Brethren, you know that in the early days God made a choice among you, that by my mouth the Gentiles would hear the word of the gospel and believe. (Acts 15:7 nasb)

Peter went to the household of Cornelius, a Roman centurion and a Gentile—not because he chose to, but because God chose him to go. (See Acts 10.) Everything significant in the body of Christ and in the service of the Lord proceeds out of God’s choice, not out of man’s choice.

The principle of God’s initiative may be seen as well in the life of the apostle Paul. He had a marvelous revelation of Jesus on the Damascus road, after which he went into Damascus and remained for three days without being able to see. When Paul had spent three days in blindness, taking neither food nor drink, God sent another disciple, Ananias, to pray for Paul so that he might receive his sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit. When Ananias encountered Paul, he said to him,

The God of our fathers has chosen you that you should know His will, and see the Just One [Jesus], and hear the voice of His mouth. For you will be His witness to all men of what you have seen and heard. (Acts 22:14–15 nkjv)

Paul did not become an apostle because he chose that calling for himself. In fact, had the decision been left to Paul, he never would have chosen it. Left to himself, becoming an apostle would have been the furthest idea from his thinking. Additionally, no one in the early church would ever have chosen Paul to be an apostle. He would have been at the bottom of the list. But God made the choice.
“The God of our fathers,”
Ananias said,
“has chosen you that you should know His will, and see the Just One, and hear the voice of His mouth. For you will be His witness to all men….”

Confidence in God’s Choice

When God makes the choice, such as He did in the above examples from the New Testament, a certain confidence is released. Ananias did not say to Paul, “God wants you to be His witness,” but rather,
“You
will be
His witness.”
Why would Paul be God’s witness? Because God had chosen him. If we would have that attitude in our lives, it would release tremendous confidence in us. If we would find out what God has chosen us to be, instead of trying to be something on our own, then we would have a quiet confidence in our hearts and minds. We would know that the Lord will empower us to be whatever He has chosen us to be.

Again, we need to emphasize that God’s choice is based on His foreknowledge. And
foreknowledge
simply means “knowing in advance.” The life of Abraham is a very clear example of God’s foreknowledge. The Lord said the following about Abraham:

Shall I hide from Abraham what I am doing, since Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him? For
I have known him
, in order that he may command his children and his household after him, that they may keep the way of the Lord, to do righteousness and justice, that the Lord may bring to Abraham what He has spoken to him. (Genesis 18:17–19 nkjv)

God chose Abraham because He had known him. He knew Abraham was a man in whom He could fulfill His will—a man who would do all He wanted him to accomplish.

It is so comforting and so important to understand that God’s choice in our lives is based upon His knowledge of us. Please, never allow yourself to hold an attitude that says, “Well, God has chosen me to do something, but I can’t do it.” God knows you can accomplish His will. If He didn’t believe you could do it, He wouldn’t have chosen you. He chose you on the basis of His knowledge of you.

It is very interesting that the
New American Standard Bible
translates Genesis 18:19 not as “
I have known him
” but
“I have
chosen
him.”
Those are two ways of translating the same Hebrew word. Without going into all the reasons why it could be translated either way, the main point it brings out is that God’s knowledge leads to His choice.

Let God Choose

You and I need to apply the reality of God’s choice to our own lives. Here is a beginning piece of advice: Never try to be something God has not chosen you to be. Do not make your own plan—and do not depend upon the best you can do—because that is not sufficient.
Find out what God has chosen you to be.
It may be very different from what you have anticipated or planned for yourself. But when you discover what God’s choice is, then you can know for certain that it is based upon His knowledge of you. He knows you well enough for you to be confident that, by His grace, you can be and do all He has chosen you to be and to do.

To me, my daughter Jessika is a beautiful picture of God’s choice. For many years, my first wife, Lydia, and I were responsible for a college that trained African teachers in Kenya. We were very busy, and Lydia was well up in years, being somewhat older than I.

One evening, at about half-past six, a strange group appeared on our doorstep: a white lady and a black African couple. The white lady was carrying a little black baby girl wrapped in a dirty towel. We asked, “Why have you come?”

They said, “This little girl’s mother died when she was born. A social worker found her on the floor of the hut and took her to the local hospital. They’ve looked after her for six months, but they have now said, ‘This is a hospital and not a children’s home. We can’t keep her any longer.’ We have been going around this part of Kenya for three days looking for a family—Asian, African, or European—that would take this little baby. We heard that you took in children.”

My wife replied to them, “That was years ago. We’re much too old to do that now. Besides, we’re so busy with our educational work, and we really don’t have any time for a little baby—and a sick baby at that.”

So, this group of people said, “We’re so tired. Would you let us just sit down for half an hour and rest?” We invited them in, and at the end of the half hour, they got up to go. When they did, the white lady carrying the little baby passed by me. As she went past, the baby stretched out one hand toward me, as if to say, “What are you going to do about me?” I am not a fanciful person, but the baby’s action was so unusual as to be arresting to me.

At that moment, I looked at my wife. Normally, we would never make a decision like that without talking to each other privately. But I said, “Maybe we’ll change our minds.” Lydia—God bless her—said, “Give me a week to get some baby clothes and a crib, and then bring her back.”

That is how we got our ninth daughter, who today is a sweet Christian woman serving the Lord. There were millions of African baby girls, and God laid His hand on this one—she was God’s sovereign choice for us. As we will see in the next chapter, God’s choice is due to His predestination. Jessika was predestined by God to become our daughter. I have always been glad that God made that choice and that we responded with the decision to take her.

Let me close by making what could be a rather controversial statement. Why is it controversial? Because I believe it is the opposite of much of the thinking in the contemporary church. Here it is:
God makes His selection. He does not call for volunteers.
A lot of people in the church have the idea that they can volunteer for something, and God will accept that. That is not true. God makes His choice, and He does not ask us to volunteer. He simply asks us to respond to His choice.

Never try to be something God has not chosen you to be.

It may be that you have never actively responded to God’s calling upon you. This would be an ideal moment to do so. If you would like to respond to God’s call on your life, please make this declaration in simple faith:

Lord, I thank You that, by Your initiative and foreknowledge, You have called me. I respond positively right now to Your call upon my life. It is not I who have chosen You—it is You who have chosen me. You have a purpose and a plan for my life. I am not an “accident waiting to happen”—I am Your servant, chosen by You and called to do Your will. I acknowledge and gratefully accept the fact that You have chosen me and that You have called me. Thank You, dear Lord. Amen.

Now that you have taken this very important step of acknowledging God’s call upon your life, we will move ahead in our teaching to stage three of God’s plan for us in eternity.

9

THIRD STAGE: PREDESTINED

The third stage of God’s plan for us—which also takes place in eternity—is “He predestined us.” The noun
predestination
was formed from the verb
predestined
. As I said earlier,
predestined
is a rather frightening word to many people because they relegate it to some tremendous theological issue about salvation. Consequently, they tend to shy away from it. Actually, its meaning is rather simple: being “predestined” simply means that
God has arranged in advance the course your life is to follow
. The New Testament lays great emphasis on the fact that God has predestined us. In this chapter, we will explore four examples of this truth.

Scriptural Teachings on Predestination

Our first two examples of the fact that God has predestined us are found in Romans 8, where Paul wrote,

For those whom [God] foreknew,
He also
predestined
to become conformed to the image of his Son…; and these whom
He
predestined
, He also called; and these whom He called, He also justified; and these whom He justified, He also glorified. (Romans 8:29–30 nasb)

In this passage, Paul twice stated that God predestined those whom He called. Please notice
to what
we are predestined, because that is very important. Many people tend to talk about being predestined to heaven or to hell, an approach that often confuses or offends those who listen to them. But Paul said we are predestined
“to become conformed to the image of
[God’s]
Son,”
Jesus Christ.

If somebody tells me he is predestined to heaven, yet I see no fruit is his life and no trace of godliness, I might well question the validity of what he is saying. However, if I see somebody who is becoming truly conformed in his life and character to the person and nature of Jesus Christ, then I must conclude that there is only one explanation for it—he must have been predestined. It could not have come about in any other way.

Many people talk about being predestined to heaven or to hell. But Paul said we are predestined “to become conformed to the image of
[
God’s
]
Son.”

Then, in Ephesians, Paul provided the third example of the fact that God has predestined us:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him. In love
He predestined us
to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved [Jesus]. (Ephesians 1:3–6 nasb)

Not only did God predestine us to be conformed to the image of Christ, but He also predestined us to be adopted to Himself as His children through Jesus Christ. This was His
“kind intention,”
which He settled in eternity. For what purpose are we so predestined? Paul added that all of this is designed to work out
“to the praise of the glory of His grace.”

So, in the above passage, Paul stated three characteristics of our predestination. First, we are predestined to be sons of God by being adopted into His family. Second, our predestination is intended to bring glory to God. And, third, it all happens by His grace.

The ultimate purpose of everything in the universe is to glorify God. In that regard, then, the essence of sin is the failure to glorify God. Paul wrote,
“All have sinned…”
(Romans 3:23). How have all sinned? By
“
[falling]
short of the glory of God”
(Romans 3:23). Therefore, God’s purpose in predestination is to retrieve His glory, which our sin had robbed Him of. He accomplishes all this through His grace—not through our works. He brings us into His family in such a way that our lives bring glory to Him. You and I are realistic enough about ourselves to acknowledge that if something positive does not happen in our lives by God’s grace, it is never going to happen.